Abe, or The Koog

I’ve heard the phrase “pandemic play” a few times, and in fact I’ve used it myself – about plays written during the pandemic (not in reference to plays about the pandemic). But the rhetorical quirk of the word “pandemic” as an adjective here makes me think about stuff I haven’t really thought about since 2020, but felt so ubiquitous at the time. I have a distinct memory of referring to my pandemic hair, my partner had a thing about pandemic pants, I remember someone referring to their pandemic dog, and of course we all remember the pandemic bread. So much pandemic bread. 

In the case of pandemic theater, yes, of course that happened too. When it did, it was theater because it was performed live, and the audience was always intended to be experiencing it live, rather than via recording which I guess would make it television? 

But the thing about a pandemic play – that is, a play not written for Zoom but for the live stage, but written during the pandemic – is that its audience always existed, and only existed, in the future.

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Abe Koogler’s Staff Meal is a pandemic play in that it was written (or at least completed) during the pandemic; if it is a pandemic play beyond that, it is not because of any direct reference but perhaps by theme: isolation, distance, reflection, and mourning the loss of shared spaces. Certainly when I read it, I felt a pandemic shadow.

I first met Abe at The Lark, which was, much like the restaurant in Staff Meal, a place that in its day housed countless acts of service, and which now sits sadly and irrevocably abandoned. Abe (or The Koog, as The Lark’s Andrea Hiebler was quick to dub him, and which makes him kind of like The Fonz only much Koogler) had a long history at The Lark, culminating in his fellowship residency during and throughout the onset of the pandemic and the demise of the company. So whatever shadow the pandemic casts on the play as I read it, The Lark casts another one. This is complicated, I know; there are things that resonate with me that I can’t imagine resonate in exactly the same way with others, and so I accept that my response is singular. But I also suspect that with a play like this, any audience’s response to the play is similarly singular. 

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I can’t pretend to fully understand the theory of “block time,” or the existence of a timespace in which everything is happening all at once: that time doesn’t move in a linear direction (or in any direction) but is instead only a human construct. But I get the part of it that physicists insist means we are always all of ourselves: we are dying and just being born, we are waking up and falling asleep, we are our best selves and in our worst ever moment, we are both post-pandemic and ignorant of the pandemic at the same time. In Staff Meal’s imagination, characters might be many things at once, in many places at once, and in many times. You might be too, as you’re watching it, so in Staff Meal’s spaces – the shuttered shared spaces we miss, the vast cavernous childhood castles full of sadness and powerlessness that haunt us in memory, the dank and impossibly deep spaces far below the surface of the earth that we must climb up and down and up and down from, and especially the unwritten spaces between the scenes of the play that we do not experience but fill with our own remembrances and present-tense concerns and future-tense aspirations – all of these spaces taken together insist that we conjure their contents ourselves.

VAGRANT
(To us:) What followed were the best years of my life. Extraordinary, ordinary life. 

Do we see the faintest edges of it? 

Unfortunately, we won’t have time to show you that. The rest of the play is about how it ended.

When I’m writing, when I’m teaching, or when I’ve served in support of writers in workshop programs, a set of questions I like to ask when thinking about a play is: What is the highest, most joyful moment in the play? Is it high enough? What is the lowest, most painful moment in the play? Is it low enough? The scope of a play is the distance between those poles. In Staff Meal, the highest point is one that we’re given the space and the task to imagine for ourselves. When I reached this point in the play, I had to pause. I sat and considered, as The Koog insisted I do, the faintest edges of what that extraordinary, ordinary life meant to me.

I know this play wasn’t written for me, but I also believe that of course it was. I don’t suppose I can ever insist to an audience how it should approach a play it’s watching, but I can’t help but hope Staff Meal’s audience insists that of course it was written for them, singular them, as well. 

SERVER 2
Like it’s great that people who are into it really dig it, but if not that many really dig it, then are you really fulfilling the purpose of a restaurant?

Writing a play during a moment in history when no theaters existed, when we all thought we might die, when any estimate of when a theater might ever stage another play was utterly impossible to calculate, is an inherently hopeful act. It is to imagine an audience in some undefined future, in a space that’s impossible to visualize. There is nothing more optimistic.

I don’t think I’m spoiling the ending (because I don’t think I could accurately describe the ending if I wanted to) but I can say that there is a meal, and it’s cooked for just one person, who doesn’t have a name but could be you and could be me and could be The Koog or Andrea Hiebler all at once. It’s an elegy, a eulogy, and a memory. But mostly, it is an Act of Service, as defined by the play itself, which is exactly the purpose of a restaurant.

Lloyd Suh is the author of The Heart Sellers, The Far Country (Pulitzer Prize finalist), The Chinese Lady, and others. He served as Director of Artistic Programs at The Lark from 2011-2020.